Angel In A Red Dress, by Aubry, Lady At Large

by Golda Poretsky, H.H.C.
www.bodylovewellness.com

Listen to the podcast of this post here:

Just in time for summer… a reminder to exercise your right to bare arms.

I think nearly everyone knows that feeling, that feeling of being uncomfortable in your body and wearing too much clothing to cover it up. How many of you have worn a sweater over a sleeveless dress in sweltering heat to cover up areas of your body that you wanted to hide? How many of you have worn a t-shirt in the pool for the same reason? How many of you have worn all black on a hot summer’s day?

I can answer an emphatic “I have” to all of the above questions. I’ve done all of those things – and more. And all they made me was sweaty, uncomfortable and angry. I felt angry that I “wasn’t allowed” to dress the way that thinner people dressed and I was angry at myself for being fat.

A few years ago I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to let myself be angry and uncomfortable (or sweaty!) any more. I realized that the idea that I “wasn’t allowed” to wear less clothing was really a self-imposed rule. No matter how it might feel, you can’t get a ticket for wearing a tank top!

When I was just learning to love my body, I started using a technique that I’m going to share with you right now. I would decide that whatever part of my body that I was feeling iffy or wrong about was the absolute, most sexy, attractive, alluring part of my body. Not only was this part of my body super gorgeous, it was so gorgeous that people wished that their bodies looked that way.

Now, I realize that this might seem way over the top, and, indeed, it is. I have found, however, that sometimes you need to swing the pendulum way in the opposite direction before things start to even out. So if you’re going around hating your belly, you may just have to decide that your belly is the sexiest thing on the planet before you can start to feel reasonably good, every day, about your belly.

Why does this matter? Because hiding your body sends a message to others and to yourself. It sends a message that you are uncomfortable with how you look and that your body is unacceptable. It sends the message that making yourself acceptable to other people is more important than your own needs. And I can tell you that the more you try to be acceptable to other people by ignoring what you need, the more you will feel unfulfilled, angry, self-hateful, uncomfortable, and, at least in the summer, sweaty.

If you’re sick of feeling bad about how you look and want to know how you can feel better this summer (and beyond), join me for my upcoming free teleclass — How To Feel Sexy At Any Size.

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Golda Poretsky, H.H.C. is a certified holistic health counselor who specializes in transforming your relationship with food and your body. Go to http://www.bodylovewellness.com/stay-in-touch/ to sign up for her newsletter and get your free download — Golda’s Top Ten Tips For Divine Dining!

Please join me for the Body Love Boost Teleclass this December!

Here’s what you get when you join us!

• Learn how to eat healthfully without dieting.
• Learn how to eat intuitively and connect with your body’s needs.
• Create a peaceful and stress free relationship with food and eating.
• Feel comfortable in your skin, no matter what the situation.
• Gain new confidence in yourself and your choices.
• Be as healthy as you can be, no matter what size you are.
• Be welcomed into a community of people who desire to create similar changes in their lives.
• Recordings of each class so that you can listen in whenever you’d like!
  

I was recently interviewed by Jay Solomon over at More Of Me To Love.  We covered a lot of ground in this interview, from how I got started in Health At Every Size coaching to simple tips for loving your body up, right now.


See it here or read it below!

End Dieting and Experience Radical Body Love in an Interview with Expert, Golda Poretsky (October 21, 2009)

More of Me to Love: It’s so great to have the opportunity to sit down with you and learn a little bit more about what you do. Your weekly tips and blogs on body love are wonderful, but I’m sure that when people read them, they can’t help but think, what is body love? Today, I hope we all get to learn a little bit more about you and what you do. So, what made you want to get into the field of body-love counseling in the first place?

Golda Poretsky, H.H.C. of Body Love Wellness: I love this question, because it makes me feel like body-love counseling is really a field!

I was always interested in holistic health, so in 2005 I decided to take my self-taught self to the next level and go to The Institute For Integrative Nutrition.  As a lifelong dieter, a major part of my reason for attending this school was to finally figure out how not to be fat anymore.  (I’m sure More of Me to Love readers can relate to this reasoning.)  While there, I learned a lot about nutrition, and I was also introduced to the concept of intuitive eating, albeit as a weight loss method.

To make a long story short, I lost a bunch of weight on Weight Watchers while in school there, and then in 2007 began the slow, steady weight gain, while still dieting, which I’m sure many readers can relate to as well.  Somehow, I found fat acceptance and fat acceptance blogs at just the right time.  I was really lucky.
My desire in creating Body Love Wellness was to support my clients in their journey to body acceptance and a healthy relationship with food.  My own journey was one of trial and error, and I didn’t feel like I had much support from anyone other than the blog writers.  I desired to be that support for my clients and to use methods that I developed in order to make that journey easier for others. The work that I do now is a combination of things I learned at The Institute For Integrative Nutrition (healthy eating basics, dealing with health concerns nutritionally) and things I learned through my own body acceptance journey (intuitive eating, body love and acceptance).

MMTL: How long have you been doing your work?

Golda: I’ve been doing this work for about 2-3 years.

MMTL: What are your hobbies outside of body counseling?

Golda:  Oh, gosh.  I used to do musical improv comedy, which I really miss now.  I love to read – lots of new-agey nonfiction and novels.  I love to write.  I also read tarot.

MMTL: How did you come up with the name for your business, Body Love Wellness?

Golda:  As someone who was really inspired by the fat acceptance movement, “acceptance” never felt like a strong enough word to me.  I think there are two parts to fat acceptance: acceptance by society at large and self-acceptance.  To me, self-acceptance just isn’t enough.  I want people to really love themselves.  I had struggled to love myself for years without loving my body, and I realized that it just doesn’t work.  That’s why I put the emphasis of my work on Body Love.  I want people to know, up front, that I’m going to support them in loving their bodies, and it’s not a crazy idea, or something just for thin people.  It’s almost confrontational in a way that I enjoy.

MMTL: What do you think it means to “be healthy?”

Golda: I really think that being healthy is about taking care of yourself physically and emotionally.  That means eating in a way that feels good to your body and moving in a way that feels good to your body.  It also means taking care of your emotional needs, acknowledging your feelings, respecting your boundaries, and noticing when your thoughts are judgments that you’ve internalized and need to release.  You really cannot separate the physical and the emotional.  It’s really difficult to eat healthfully and sanely when you’re beating yourself up emotionally.  That’s why I find that, for many people, when they begin to heal emotionally they find it easier to listen for their internal cues about hunger, fullness, and the foods that feel best to them.

MMTL: What do you think the biggest attitude problem is that people have towards their bodies?

Golda:  I think that very often people look at their bodies as something separate from themselves and something that needs controlling.  They think that once they find the right diet or the right personal trainer, and scream at their bodies enough, their bodies will cooperate and fall into line.  This never works for long because our bodies, literally, rebel.

MMTL: How do you help people overcome their negative attitudes towards their bodies and learn to love themselves?

Golda:  I have a set curriculum that I use with clients, but I often mix it up or revise it for each individual client.  I use a multi-faceted approach, addressing everything from thought-patterns and assumptions about their bodies to more body-based, experiential assignments that they try at home and we talk about in session.  I never make assumptions about clients based upon their weight, and I guide our work together by what they really desire to change, whether it’s their relationship with food, and/or their bodies, and/or a myriad of other things.
MMTL: You live in New York. Are the majority of your clients from New York or do you take clients who live farther away as well?

Golda:  I take clients from all over.  Right now, my farthest client is in Arizona.  I love having clients from different states.  We do our sessions over the phone and correspond mainly via email.  The other day, I wanted to demonstrate a lymph moving technique, so I made my client a little one minute video and emailed it to her.  It worked out great and she loved it.

MMTL: Do you find that people in New York are more obsessive about their bodies than people in other parts of the country?

Golda:  It’s an interesting question.  I work a lot with New Yorkers and Californians who often point out how the beauty standards are so demanding where they live.  I think that wherever you have a high concentration of models and actors and entertainment industry people, the pressure to be thin can be even greater.  The great thing about New York in particular is that where there’s culture there’s also counterculture, so those who want to seek out other body positive people can find it here more and more.  Despite all that, I think that, for the most part, things are the same for clients across the country.  There may be gradations in how thin one feels pressure to be based upon where one lives, economic status, cultural norms etc., but we all live in a country where individuals feel the weight, literally, of the so-called obesity epidemic firmly on their shoulders.  We all watch underweight people on television and are told that they’re the norm; we all feel pushed to count calories or points or carbs or fat grams; we all feel like our bodies are unacceptable.  I wish things were different in different parts of the country, but I don’t think they are overall.

MMTL: Are you generally the first counselor that your clients work with who doesn’t believe in weight loss? Are you the first real body-love counselor your clients work with?
Golda:  Always.  Often clients start off by telling me how they’ve failed – how they’ve been to nutritionists or weight loss gurus who promised to help them and then blamed them for not losing their weight or for gaining it back.  It’s really heartbreaking.  At least initially, clients often feel like I can’t be for real.

MMTL: Could you please share a story with us about a particular client who had a challenging time but who you managed to see through her conflicts with her body to a life of body love?

Golda:  I’d be happy to.  One client came to mind right away.  I’ll call her Ann. Ann was in her mid-40’s and had been on diets since her early 20’s, including many starvation diets.  She also hated exercise in all forms. In the middle of her 6 month program, we got on the phone for her session and she began to tell me that she had started a new diet.  We had done a lot of work on intuitive eating and getting off dieting, but she insisted that this diet wasn’t really a diet and she felt really good about it.  Anyway, my approach is to listen and not make people feel bad about their choices, so I listened to her and let her give me updates on it.  After about 3 weeks, she realized that she had just done yet another diet and told me it was her last one ever.  Over the next few months, we worked more with intuitive eating, and she began to really love listening to her body.  Her relationship with food normalized and she even began to find exercise that she enjoyed.  Last I heard, she was so connected to herself and her needs that she received an instructor certification in a really body positive exercise program, she’s eating intuitively, she’s considering moving to a new city, and she’s getting certified as a life coach.  Her life completely changed when she began listening to what her body really needed.  It was really amazing to see her life change when she started listening to her real needs.  I find that many of my clients make major shifts like that because they become willing to connect with their deepest desires and parts of themselves.

MMTL:  How long do you typically work with clients?

Golda:  Clients usually sign up for a 6 session (3 month) or 12 session (6 month) program, though some clients like to extend beyond that, too.  I also offer a “tune-up” session for clients who have done my programs and just want to work on any new issues.  Additionally, I offer workshops and tele-classes that some clients do instead of a one-to-one program or in addition to it.

MMTL:  Do you ever relapse in your own world of body-love? If so, how do you pick yourself back up?

Golda:  Every once in a while I do.  It’s been happening a little too much ever since I’ve been live tweeting that show More To Love.  But seriously, I go back to the techniques I use with my clients.  Sometimes I literally do the same “homeplay” exercise I just sent to a client.  Sometimes it’s something more physical, like getting more dressed up than usual or taking a walk when I’m feeling pressured to work more, or it’s something more mental/emotional, like fine tuning my affirmations or connecting with why that judgmental voice is coming up in that moment.

MMTL: If you had just one simple piece of advice for people to love their bodies what would it be?

Golda:  Just one?  That is really difficult!  It’s difficult because everyone is different, so the starting point to body love is often different for different people.  But here’s one to try – take a moment, every day, to find things that you’re grateful for about your body.  Start out with a list of 10 things.  They could be things like the way your heart pumps blood, the way your immune system defends you, the way your hair sparkles in the sunlight, or the way the skin on the inside of your arms feels so soft and delicate.  As you list the things you’re grateful for (either on paper, aloud, or in your mind) make sure to notice and feel the sensation of that gratitude in your body.  It may feel very subtle or it may feel like a more obvious change.  Do this daily and you will definitely begin to notice positive changes in your connections with your body.

MMTL: Thank you so much, Golda! It was such a pleasure learning a little more about you, your body-love philosophy and the way you work with your clients.

Go to www.bodylovewellness.com for information on Golda’s one-to-one programs and workshops.

by Golda Poretsky, H.H.C.
www.bodylovewellness.com

We are constantly bombarded with dieting program ad campaigns and magazines that tout the achievements of people who have lost weight. We’re constantly told that if we’re not vigilant, if we don’t keep up the struggle, if we don’t measure and write down everything we eat and pay for packaged, calorie counted food then our bodies will fall apart and we’ll gain 100′s of pounds and no one will ever love us etc. etc. etc.

About a year ago, I developed this list to support my clients in finally getting off the dieting rollercoaster. (I posted it back in May, but I find it so helpful that I’m reposting it today.)

Refer to this list often. Refer to this list whenever your friend calls you up and tells you about another diet that’s working for her. Refer to this list whenever another Weight Watchers mailer arrives in your mailbox and has you believing that this time, it might work for you. Refer to this list if intuitive eating appeals to you but doesn’t quite make sense yet. Forward this list to every unhappy dieter that you know (just be sure to credit me and/or this blog).

16 Reasons Not To Diet

1) Many diets support the use of non-nutritional, highly chemicalized foods like fake fats and fake sugars. These chemicalized foods negatively affect body chemistry, cause low-level undernourishment, and often encourage overeating when the dieter gets the signal that s/he is not getting properly nourished.

2) Diets have such a high failure rate that they really are a gamble with a low chance of success. Why not just play Keno? If you look at the fine print of most studies on diets, they will tell you that, despite potential immediate success in limited numbers, diets have a 90-99% long-term failure rate. People lose some weight, only to find their weight creep back up, often surpassing their initial, pre-diet weight. Even the “successful” dieters often don’t keep all of their weight off.

3) Dieting gives dieters the message that they cannot trust their internal sense of what nourishes them. This distrust of internal signals affects other aspects of a dieter’s life, where they seek external approval and control of their non-food related actions.

4) The diet industry has a deep interest in the failure of dieters — if everyone got skinny, they’d go out of business.

5) Dieters’ self esteem is often tied to their weight — they feel good about themselves when they’re losing weight and bad about themselves when they’re gaining weight. This is a particular problem given item #2, if most dieters regain the weight they lose, they spend much of their lives feeling bad about themselves.

6) The diet system reinforces low self esteem in dieters by making them feel like they have no “willpower” when they have diet lapses. In actuality, diets encourage people to ignore their internal will in exchange for the perceived will of the diet industry. This out of control feeling reinforces low self esteem and makes dieters feel out of control in other areas of their lives.

7) Rather than being about nourishment, food often becomes about reward and punishment for dieters. They let themselves have a “treat” because they’ve been “good” on their diets and deprive themselves when they’ve been “bad.” Food is a necessary part of life. When food is about reward and punishment, we override our internal cues about what our bodies actually need.

8) Diets cause dieters (who are often women) to revolve their lives around food rather than other things that may really matter to them (relationships, careers, social issues). Who knows how many great ideas, inventions, beautiful relationship etc. the world is missing out on because so many of us are so obsessed with dieting.

9) Diets cause a lot of body hatred, particularly when the dieter isn’t losing weight. Dieters tend to see their bodies as wrong and problematic when they’re not seeing the “results” they want. But really, body and mind are connected, and this false conflict creates a great deal of unhappiness.

10) Diets often categorize foods as good/okay vs. bad/forbidden. Just like our culture’s genesis story revolves around a woman eating a forbidden food (the apple), it’s human nature to want what’s forbidden. Thus, it’s no wonder that dieters often crave forbidden foods even more once they are forbidden, and then hate themselves for eating those foods (maybe because they’re made to feel as though they’ve caused all of humanity to become sinners).

11) Diets encourage what I like to call “lottery thinking” — most dieters know that diets haven’t really worked for them nor most of the people they know, yet they think that some new diet is going to make them thin, and they’ll finally be in that tiny successful group. This creates a great deal of disappointment for dieters who are constantly trying to achieve something that is nearly impossible.

12) Most diet programs are expensive. I cringe when I think about the money that I and my friends and family have spent over the years on Weight Watchers, special shakes and diet pills!

13) For some people, diets are like Band-aids on deep scars. For people who really overeat and eat unconsciously, they often eat to numb their feelings and consciousness. Their issue is not really “portion control.” In fact, they often are too controlling of themselves and their emotions.

14) Diets assume that all fat people eat too much. They don’t account for the fact that people come in all shapes and sizes, and that a person’s weight is not an indicator of overall health.

15) The weight loss/gain cycle created by dieting is more stressful on the body than just being plain, old fat.

16) Diets work on a scarcity principle. Diets make dieters focus on lack, tell them they can only have “this much and no more” and that to want more is a bad thing. Because dieting is so all-encompassing, this scarcity principle often filters into other aspects of dieters’ lives. They begin to see lack and scarcity in their relationships, in their jobs, and in the world.

What would you add to this list?

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Golda Poretsky, H.H.C.

www.bodylovewellness.com

I’ve been meditating a lot on my work over the last few weeks, and I’ve come to some conclusions.

My desire right now is to have as many people in Body Love Boost Teleclass as want to be in it. I believe in the transformative healing power of body acceptance and intuitive eating, and I want as many people to experience it as possible. This means you too!

Therefore, I’ve lowered the price of this class to $45. That amount gets you 3 phone-in classes, emailed handouts, and recordings of our classes for you to keep.

Click here to register right now for $45.

When you register, you get these tools:

• Learn how to eat healthfully without dieting.
• Learn how to eat intuitively and connect with your body’s needs.
• Create a peaceful and stress free relationship with food and eating.
• Feel comfortable in your skin, no matter what the situation.
• Gain new confidence in yourself and your choices.
• Be as healthy as you can be, no matter what size you are.
• Be welcomed into a community of people who desire to create similar changes in their lives.
• 
  

The juicy details:

DATES: 3 Wednesdays, 10/7, 10/14 and 10/21
TIME: 8PM –9PM
FORMAT: Call-in. Register now to receive your call-in info.
COST: $45*

*If you can’t swing $45, email me and let me know what you can manage.